Whitehat hackers have struck back at the operators of the perniciousCryptoLocker ransom trojan that has held hundreds of thousands ofhard drives hostage.

Through a partnership that included researchers from FOX-IT andFireEye, researchers managed to recover the private encryption keysthat CryptoLocker uses to lock victims' personal computer filesuntil they pay a $300 ransom. They also reverse engineered thebinary code at the heart of the malicious program. The result: awebsite that allows victims to recover the key for their individualcontent.

This is GREAT news. So far only one customer has gotten infected withCryptoLocker, but it nearly wrecked his business because it encrypted hisbilling statements, customer lists, estimate forms, just about everything abusiness needs. Because the backup drive was connected to the computer atthe time the backups were also encrypted.

Hopefully we'll be able to get his stuff restored this weekend.

Thanks for the heads-up on this.

--dk

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